Steam is used is numerous plants and methods to provide utility heating to reboilers and other devices. For example, steam heaters are commonly used in the stripper reboiler of an amine plant (e.g., those using the ECONAMINE FG PLUSSM (Fluor Technologies Corp.) process) for regeneration of a solvent for CO2 capture. While the required steam pressure in the reboiler is typically determined by the specific reboiler configuration and process demand, the available steam pressure in most plants is often dictated by an external utility system and is invariably higher than the pressure required by the reboiler, as in most known systems steam is generated at fixed pressure intervals. Consequently, heat recovery in the steam generation process is less than desirable. Moreover, steam generation in external utility systems often precludes waste heat recovery from various sources.
Consequently, although various configurations and methods for steam production are known in the art, all or almost all of them suffer from one or more disadvantages. Thus, there is still a need to provide improved methods and configurations for steam production, and especially low-pressure steam production.